Source:
Taken from the students’
audiotaped notes on Dogmatics,
recorded
during the lessons delivered by professor fr. John
Romanides, Thessaloniki,
1972.

A brief yet comprehensive presentation of basic issues regarding the Church,
as presented by fr. John Romanides.

The Church is the
body of Christ, which is comprised of all those faithful in
Christ; of those who participate in the first resurrection and
who bear the betrothal of the Spirit or even those who have
foretasted theosis (deification). The Church has existed even
before Creation, as the kingdom and the glory that is hidden
within God and in which God resides, along with His Logos and
His Spirit. By a volition of God, the aeons were created, as
were the celestial powers and the incorporeal spirits or angels
therein, and thereafter, Time and the world within it, in which
Man was also created, who unites within himself the noetic
energy of the angels with the logos-reason and the human body.

The Church is both
invisible and visible; in other words, She is comprised of those
who are enlisted (in active duty) on earth and those who are in
the heavens, that is, those who have triumphed in the glory of
God.

Among the
Protestants there prevails the opinion that the Church is
invisible only - whereas the sacraments of Baptism and the
Divine Eucharist are merely symbolic acts - and that only God
knows who the true members of the Church are. The Orthodox
Church, on the other hand, also stresses the visible aspect of
the Church. Outside the Church, there is no salvation.

The Church, as the
body of Christ, is the residence of God’s uncreated glory. It
is impossible for us to separate Christ from the Church, as it
is to separate the Church from Christ. In Papism and
Protestantism there is a clear distinction between the body of
Christ and the Church; that is, one can participate in the body
of Christ, without being a member of the Papist church. This is
impossible for Orthodoxy.

According to the
Calvinists, after His Ascension, Christ resides in heaven and
consequently, the transformation of bread and wine into actual
Body and Blood of Christ is impossible…. A complete absence of
Christ…. Approximately the same thing is highlighted in the
Papist church, because, Christ is regarded as absent, and
through the minister’s prayer, He descends from the heavens and
becomes present. This implies that Christ is absent from the
Church. Members of the Church are –as mentioned previously-
those who have received the betrothal of the Spirit and the
deified ones.

When the ancient
Church referred to the body of Christ as the Church, and Christ
as the Head of the Church, they of course did not mean that
Christ was spread out bodily all over the world and that He –for
example- had His Head in Rome, the one hand in the East and the
other in the West, but that the whole of Christ exists in
every individual church with all its members, i.e., the Saints
and the faithful of the Universe. In this way, according to the
teaching of the Fathers, when we perform the Divine Eucharist,
not only is Christ present, but all His Saints and the
Christians of the Universe are present, in Christ. When we
receive a
tiny morsel
of the Holy Bread, we receive all of Christ inside us. When
Christians gather together for the same reason, the whole
Church is gathering together, and not just a fraction of it.
This is the reason that it has become predominant in Patristic
Tradition to refer to the temple of a monastery as the
“Katholikon”. The destination of all the faithful is theosis
(deification). This is everyone’s ultimate objective. This is
why a Christian must proceed “from glory to glory”; in other
words, the slave must first become a salaried worker,
then a son of God and a faithful member of Christ. There cannot
be salvation outside the Church. Christ offers redemptive grace
to all people. When one is saved outside the visible Church, it
means that Christ Himself has saved him. If he is a
heterodox member then he is saved because it was Christ who
saved him, and not the religious “offshoot” that he belongs to.
His salvation therefore is not effected by the ‘church’ he
belongs to, because One is the Church that saves - and that is
Christ.

Wherever the
Orthodox dogma does not exist, the Church is in no position to
opine on the authority of the sacraments. According to the
Fathers, the Orthodox Dogma never separates itself from
spirituality. Wherever there is an erroneous dogma, there is an
erroneous spirituality and vice-versa. There are many who
separate the dogma from piety. That is a mistake. When Christ
says “become ye perfect, as the Father is…” it implies that one
must be familiar with the meaning of perfection. The criterion
for the authority of the sacraments for us Orthodox is the
Orthodox dogma, whereas for the heterodox, it is Apostolic
Succession. For the Orthodox Tradition, it is not enough to
trace one’s ordination back to the Apostles, but to possess the
Orthodox dogma. Piety and dogma are one identity and cannot be
separated. Wherever there is upright teaching, there will be
upright action. “Orthodox” means:

a) upright glory,

b) upright act.

The terrestrial,
actively engaged Church is the Orthodox Church. “Orthodox dogma”
and “Scriptural teaching” are one and the same thing, because
the dogma exists, and it comes from within the Holy Bible.

Taken from the
students’
audiotaped
notes on Dogmatics,
recorded
during the lessons delivered by professor fr. John Romanides,
Thessaloniki, 1972.